Red Sea Shark Attacks

I'm not recommending this news report, which is a bit misleading on several points, but wanted to mention a couple of important items in it.

First, it quotes George Burgess of the International Shark Attack File confirming that one particular oceanic whitetip shark was responsible for at least two separate attacks. "We can actually say with certainty that one individual shark was involved in two of them without fail," he says. "That has not been documented before." I'd only add that while it hasn't been documented to a scientific certainty before, there's no real doubt that a single shark mauled three people in Matawan Creek, New Jersey, in 1916. One of those victims provoked the shark by trying to stop it from feeding on the child it had killed. The other two attacks were unprovoked. Two other people were taken by sharks in the ocean nearby around this time, but we can't be certain the same shark attacked them.

Scientists do not believe sharks ever take people as preferred prey. It would appear that the same shark rarely attacks more than one human in a lifetime. It's hard to be certain because it's difficult to prove which shark is responsible for a given attack.

The other important item here is an admission by the authorities that the sharks they caught last week were the wrong ones. "We did some efforts last week but I think we failed." and Salem Saleh, director of the Tourism Authority in